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Monday, 23 February 2015

"Think anybody these days would disregard George RR Martin or JK Rowling on the subject of typeface or cover design? That’s even if they could. Jonny Geller wrote for The Bookseller recently about how Susanna Clarke’s deal for the miniseries of Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell gives her more control than the original film deal twelve years ago. That’s not a concession, not a sop to the author’s preening ego. It’s a win-win. An author like Ms Clarke, as demiurge of their story universe, sits at the heart of its sun. From there, everything is illuminated. By comparison, anybody else can only know half as much – and most of that will be wrong."

This week I began a regular column in The Bookseller. My first piece (excerpt above) is about the role of the writer as creative champion of a project - whether book, comic, videogame, TV show or movie. (Or radio play, I guess - gimme a break, you know how hard it is being a Renaissance Man these days?) Pop over and take a look. Leave a comment. Debate is good, and remember there are no right answers.

Friday, 13 February 2015

I would have thought everybody in the Western world must see Galileo as the hero of his story. An old man is hauled before a religious court and threatened with torture if he will not recant his conclusion, based on observation and logic, that the Earth goes round the Sun.

Don’t imagine this scene as a C of E vicar offering Galileo a cup of tea and saying, “Look here, old boy, we can avoid a lot of nastiness if you’ll just say the words.” Think of how Ibsen or Miller would write it. It’s the third degree administered by intolerant zealots who believe it’s better for you to die than to challenge the frail edifice of their beliefs. For speaking truth to the embarrassment of power, they subjected Galileo to “rigorous examination”. That’s Inquisition lingo for shining the lamp in your eyes and showing you that the rubber hoses are next. If the mere thought of it doesn’t make you tremble, you’re not using your imagination.

Galileo gave in, and the Church breathed a sigh of relief. They were that frightened of a seventy-year-old man. But he was heard to mutter, ‘And yet it does move’ – no doubt from simple incredulity at their attempts to impose their beliefs on nature. He was ruled guilty of ‘holding and defending an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture’. House arrest followed. His books were banned. Galileo died in disgrace.

A hero to all of us, then, surely? Even to the modern Catholic Church, which disputes no part of the scientific method, accepts the Big Bang and the theory of evolution, and funds its own legitimate research into cosmology and particle physics, by God.

But even in the 21st century there are corners where the cobwebs remain. Galileo is no hero as far as the heir to the British throne is concerned. It seems Prince Charles blames many of the world’s ills on the principles of scepticism, curiosity and empiricism that Galileo championed:

'This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works, and how we fit within the scheme of things. As a result, Nature has been completely objectified — “She” has become an “it” — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.'

What ills, exactly? The royal goon cannot have studied history, or he wouldn’t imagine the world prior to the seventeenth century to have been such a spiritual paradise. ‘Faith’ back then meant repression, massacres, torture just as much as a nice bit of plainsong and a new lick of paint on a chapel ceiling. It was a world where you were told what was good for you and any show of independence counted as thought crime. How revealing that our sovereign-in-waiting would like to turn the clock back.

I suppose the future Charles III cannot be expected to care about the scientific advances that unchallenged faith would have suppressed. Vaccines. Antibiotics. Gene therapy. Ungodly things like that. This is a man who believes that coffee enemas can cure cancer. After Dr Edzard Ernst criticized Charles’s lobbying in support of quack remedies like homeopathy, the Prince’s private secretary demanded that Exeter University discipline Ernst:

'After a thirteen-month investigation, Exeter found no evidence to justify [the] charges, but royal displeasure was enough to cow its servile administrators. Ernst had made Exeter an internationally acclaimed centre of medical research. No matter. First they limited his contacts with the press, and then they stopped raising funds for his centre. Ernst left, and without funding his team disbanded […] and Britain lost its only centre for evaluating the safety and effectiveness of the "cures" that cranks and hucksters push at the public.'

Aha, his petulant resentment of Galileo makes more sense now. Little upstart scientist, threatening to upset a cosy incunabulum of wishful thinking with ill-mannered truth. Thank goodness we still have the equivalent of an Inquisition to slap these people down, eh what?

I’m a socialist (with the champagne option, admittedly) but I usually argue against turning the UK into a republic. It’s not that I support the idea of a monarchy, but a modern society is a complex system. You can’t yank out a major part and expect the outcome to be entirely predictable. If nothing else, replacing an hereditary head of state with a politician doesn’t strike me as any kind of improvement. Throughout history, the real advances have been made through reforms (admittedly sometimes after an intervening period of revolutionary chaos) that reset everything on a slightly more meritocratic basis. We will have people in charge and those who have more wealth than others, so better if it’s a Barack Obama or a Bill Gates than somebody who got the job by brutality or accident of birth.

Hence I’d favour keeping the monarchy at a reduced cost. Or we could simply adopt the Dutch monarchy (it’s the House of Orange, after all) and split the bill with Holland. Who knows, maybe the Americans would like to buy into the franchise too.

A constitutional monarchy works because a politically disinterested head of state is exactly what a stable society needs. But maybe, because Queen Elizabeth II has done the job so well, I’ve been lulled into overlooking the flaws in the system. If something can go wrong, Murphy reminds us that it will. Even smart people have been ruined by an over-privileged upbringing. A life surrounded by yes-men could easily deliver a monarch who feels it’s his or her job to lobby politicians and shoot off at the mouth to journalists about topics such as fracking, nanotech, and mitochondrial transfer on which he or she has largely been informed by the popular media – a feedback loop instilling ninnyish dread of the new.

A monarch who feels entitled to arrogate a political role is certainly no better than an elected head of state and likely a lot worse. As it seems that’s exactly the role Prince Charles envisages for himself, I am beginning to hope that the days of the British royal family are numbered. By 2030, under President Rustyrockets, we may have a new republic founded on the principles of faith (all of them, of course, in one great pudding), conspiracy theories, and distrust of facts and graphs, topped off with a vaguely Green domestic policy. Plus ça change.

Thursday, 5 February 2015

Some years ago, Jamie Thomson and I were setting up a development company using investment and personnel from the games publisher where we worked. There were three contracts to negotiate (for two games and the start-up itself) each the size and complexity of a government white paper. So every evening after work, Jamie and I would sit with the publisher’s lawyers hammering out the deal point by point. Days of this. Did I curse my lot? Oh yes. ‘I’m game designer, not a contracts lawyer,’ was the habitual grumble.

Why not use our own lawyers? That’s an expensive way to begin a start-up, since each clause had to be parsed as if it were a safety instruction for the ISS. The main reason, though, is that lawyers can’t do your negotiating for you. It’s like an author with an agent. Don’t you and the agent have congruent goals? Not quite. He or she gets a percentage, but you’re the one who has to live by the contract’s terms. Make sure, therefore, that you’ve scrutinized and agreed every point.

These days you don’t have to be involved in a start-up to need to know your way around a contract. Authors have become savvier now that they have the option to self-publish. About time, too. When I started out in the business, it was common for authors to sign publishing deals that gave no guarantee of print runs or marketing spend. It still is, actually. Quite recently a friend of mine had a novel published by one of the Big Five that I have yet to see in any bookstore or reviewed in any magazine or paper. They might as well have put concrete overshoes on his manuscript and tossed it in the East River.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are three things that an author should look out for when negotiating with a publisher. Attend to those and the contract can be, as an idealist once said, ‘an agreement between friends to make sure they stay friends.’

First, a publishing deal is a joint venture. In any joint venture, you can only agree an equitable division of spoils when you know what each party is putting in. Now, there’s no way to know the value of a novel before it’s published – if there were, we’d all self-publish. But you do know how much money (in terms of time and risk) you invested in it. Say it’s nine months. What is nine months of your time worth? Once you’ve settled on that, find out what the publisher is going to be investing. They have no reason not to be specific; this is a partnership after all. Say that their editing, design, printing, distribution and advertising tots up to the same as your nine man-months. That’s a fifty-fifty JV, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. The advance has to be factored in, of course, but remember that you’re the early investor here. You plunged on in the wild surmise that nine months at the keyboard would result in something that others would deem worth reading. Publishing your book isn’t a personal favour.

By the way, authors can be delicate flowers so maybe you don’t like the idea of demanding to know the publisher’s business plan for the book? Spin it around. Do you think they would sign a contract that specified all their obligations but left blank the details of what you were going to write? The reason they wouldn’t is they can always do a deal with someone else. And so can you. You have a finished manuscript. You can walk across the road and publish with someone else. They want your book, remember. Any glint of magisterial disdain you may detect is really the shiny sweat of desperation.

For the second tip, skip to the stuff at the back: what does the contract say about its own termination? In the old days termination might be triggered by a book going out of print, but with print on demand that’s meaningless. Instead you’ll need to agree a minimum level of sales. Consider that and other termination conditions. Your aim is to make sure that the rights don’t remain tied up in perpetuity. The day may well come when the publisher has no great interest in promoting your book. Fair enough, it’s not their baby, but you won't feel the same way. The partnership then no longer makes any sense, so make sure you aren't going to be chained together after that point is reached.

Thirdly, be aware that it’s all very well to make statements of intent, but the contract has to back them up. Short of a default that triggers actual termination, what happens if one of the parties fails to do what they said they would? In the bigger world, a company might undertake not to dump dangerous chemicals in the sea. If they do, they are fined a million dollars, say. Right there you have a clause that, if the cost of processing those chemicals to make them safe is more than a million, stands as a guarantee that they will get dumped in the sea. A contract is a set of game rules, you see. You sign and then you start playing the game and each side will see what they can do to win.

This isn’t cynicism, just reasonable caution. You’ll hear of the ‘Chinese Contract’ – supposedly an agreement so wisely constructed for the win-win that neither side has any reason to game it. But there are zero-sum elements in the most harmonious partnership. My wife and I can’t both have the whole of the last Rolo. You may notice grey areas in a proposed deal, and it is your job to identify them and seal up the gap. Nobody who intends to play fair would want to leave anything undefined and if they say, ‘We can decide that later,’ then leave at once. But when you do see and fix those loopholes, keep a smile on your face. ‘An agreement between friends,’ remember. Or to put it another way, ‘It’s not personal, it’s business.’

Friday, 23 January 2015

‘We need a writer for an animated TV show. It’s from a concept by Viv Stanshall – ’

I was off like a shot. Viv Stanshall? The Bonzos. Do Not Adjust Your Set. Sir Henry Rawlinson and Cumberpatch the gardener – not to mention Old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer. Work on something cooked up in that great rambling, fecund greenhouse of a mind? You bet.

Well, even the best of us fires a blank from time to time. Viv’s “concept” was of a bunch of kid tadpoles living in a canal. The leader’s name was Walthamstow. That was the first red flag. It was where Viv grew up, but dammit, I don’t call any of my characters Stoke Poges, do I? The first gag in the script was a pun on Henry Ford’s comment that “history is bunk”. In a show for 7-10 year olds. A writer, they said they needed? I had to explain I’m not qualified to administer the Last Rites.

Other characters in the original pitch were Taddy Boy, complete with frock coat and Chris Isaak quiff, and a frog called the Wise Old One. Along with the name of Walthamstow’s gang (the Telstars) that rather stamped an expiry date on the whole package. There was also a Scottish tadpole who wore a Tam O’Shanter and always carried tartan bagpipes. Let’s not even, as they say. To help sell all this there was an animatic for which the production company had somehow managed to rope in Stephen Fry and Neil Innes. (Innes isn’t too big a surprise, admittedly, being Viv’s old mucker and therefore bound to do it for Old Times’ Sake, but what Fry was thinking I don’t know.)

The guys at the production company were excited because they had shown the animatic to a BBC exec and he had expressed a flicker of amusement. I wasn’t there, but I’m familiar with those Matrix-like halls and I’m willing to hazard that it was really just a hiccup after a long lunch. Encouraged as they were by this apparent evidence of approval, the production company nonetheless realized that the whole thing needed to be torn down, sown with salt, and rebuilt in pristine materials.

‘That name Walthamstow…’

‘Yeah. No. That’s shit, obviously. You can get rid of that.’

‘So what do we have to keep?’

‘Well, it’s got to be called Tadpoles.’

That’s what you want in a brief – ie, it actually was. I had just finished working at Elixir Studios, so I was familiar with the canals of Camden Town and liked the idea of dropping an edgy feeling of urban clamour and detritus into the canal – a development that I don’t believe Viv would have objected to.

As it often helps to have a writing partner when you want to spin up the levels of energy needed for comedy and/or animation, I roped in a friend of mine. (She is quite well-known these days, though wasn’t back then, and as I haven’t sought her permission to talk about this, I’ll be a gentleman and leave her name out of it.) We knocked out a script (this is one of several versions) after first changing all the characters:

TADPOLES
Aquatis Personae

Finzer – aka (only to himself) "The Finz". Desperately wants to be cool, so the fact he's a tadpole AND a kid really gets him down.

Mrs Todpuddle – the gang’s teacher. The longest suffering tadpole in the canal.

Spikey – the local bully/menace. He’s a mean-eyed fish and he’d like to eat you, but not before he’s sold you a dodgy timeshare in the Norfolk Broads. Think Arthur Daley at 78 rpm.

The Frogs – three grand old figures who are only glimpsed at the water’s edge, turned half away in profile like brooding Easter Island statues. Everyone thinks the Frogs are enormously wise and the source of all good fortune, but they never speak to tadpoles and might very well not even know they exist.

What came of Tadpoles? I’m not sure. I was busy with Leo Hartas preparing our comic strip Mirabilis: Year of Wonders to appear in The DFC, as well as developing book concepts with Jamie Thomson such as the Dark Lord series. Meanwhile, my Tadpoles writing partner had projects of her own. And the production company that hired us went out of business with the new animatic only half-finished. So, shrug. You get a lot of things like this to work on if you’re a freelance writer, usually for no money up front, and most of them deserve to be deep sixed. It’s not like it was a project very dear to my heart. The only regret is that it would have been nice to do something in memory of Viv Stanshall. Maybe this show, though, would have done him no favours.

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Three years ago I rewrote Frankenstein as an interactive novel. Establishing a timeline was my first task; Mary Shelley didn’t tell us anything about the historical background to the story but I like to know that kind of detail even if it ends up in the part of the iceberg the reader doesn’t see. We know that Walton’s framing narrative is dated sometime in the eighteenth century, but presumably a reader in 1818 would feel the narrative lacking in impact if it all took place back in the days of Newton, Voltaire and Bach. So it seemed reasonable to opt for the 1790s, and I sketched out dates placing Victor Frankenstein’s story alongside the events of the French Revolution.

That was a gift. That great hopeful experiment of the Revolution, the epiphany of the Age of Reason, degenerating into unreason and terror, then into a backlash of conservatism and fear. How perfect a backdrop for what Victor is trying to achieve. You don’t need to know that the monster is murdering William Frankenstein just as Danton and Desmoulins are being guillotined, or that he is born just days after the start of the decimal calendar, but I found it added a little frisson to my imagination as I wrote.

If I were writing that book today – that is, updating the Frankenstein story – I’d have a still better metaphor in the legacy of French colonial policy. Victor brings a man into being in the midst of our society only to leave him outcast, disadvantaged, alienated. The creature – in my interactive version it’s possible for Victor to name him Adom, but the story always works better if he isn’t granted even that much – attempts to learn from his neighbours, who profess high ideals, but when he puts their liberalism to the test they reject him just like everybody else he’s approached. And so he turns to killing as the only way to exercise any agency in the world.

Justifiably or not, many French citizens of Algerian origin apparently feel much the same way towards the republic as the monster to his creator. Crammed into banlieues, they get to watch the glittering life of Paris always at arm’s length, like the monster in his hovel adjoining the De Laceys’ home. They do not necessarily feel thankful for living in one of the richest and fairest civilizations in history.

Am I saying, “Muslims are monsters"? Of course not, but thank you for giving me the opportunity, so necessary in these dumbed-down days, of correcting that. The term monster is used with some irony and ambiguity in the novel (in my version, anyway; who is the monster?) and in any case all labels are fluid. The lesson of the story is that you can soon turn others into Others if you treat them as such. Salman Rushdie recently pointed this out on Bill Maher’s Real Time show. Radical elements may whip up their followers to become matyrs, because the martyrs of one side in a struggle are the monsters of the other – and it’s that cycle of blood, fear and reprisal that fuels the maelstrom of unreason that some would like to see us sucked into.

Nor, when I evoke North African immigrant communities in France as a metaphor that could apply to a modern version of Frankenstein, do I trivialize the political situation that led to tragedies like theCharlie Hebdomurders. Transplanting a political idea into fictional form doesn’t trivialize it; it universalizes it. Social mobility even in modern Western societies is such that it can take many generations to break out of poverty. If the downtrodden class tends to be of a recognizable racial type, the injustices that invariably descend upon the poor will begin to look like prejudice. It could be Algerians in France, black people in the southern USA, Dalits in India. Simply legislating the caste/class boundaries away doesn’t solve the problem, as you will still have many generations who are left on the outside looking in. But if I tell the story of, say, an impoverished aborigine in 1960s Australia, then I am telling only that story, and there’s a risk that the reader’s existing preconceptions will turn it into simply a confirmation of what they already believe. Politicians do that every day. It’s up to writers to do something more. We need to challenge beliefs, unsettle people, shake them up, change them.

Literature’s strength is in provoking questions, not providing you with ready-made answers. If you read Frankenstein with the events of Paris, Syria, Ferguson, and Pakistan in your mind, you may see that Mary Shelley’s two-hundred-year-old story still resonates powerfully today. Which side you come out on – if indeed you think it helps anybody to pick a side – is entirely up to you.

Monday, 5 January 2015

There's so little really good writing on UK television these days that when we come across something exceptional it's worth shouting about. Here's an example of some very clever writing by Charlie Brooker from his disturbing SF series Black Mirror. (Regular readers will know that "disturbing" is a compliment around these parts.)

In an early scene in “Be Right Back”, the opening episode of season two, Ash and his wife Martha are moving into the house where he grew up. Ash tweets a photo of himself as a kid and Martha comments that it’s sweet. He tells her that it was taken on the first family trip after his brother died. They went to a safari park and “there were monkeys all over the car and nobody said anything.” The smile in the photo was fake, he says, but Martha says that doesn’t matter; his mother didn’t know that, and that’s why she kept the picture on display. That leads Ash on to talking about how his mother took down all his brother’s photos when he died. And the same with his father – “They all went up” (to the attic).

I'll come back to what's so good about that scene, but first let's look at how Brooker handles the nuts and bolts of plot development. This is going to get spoilery, by the way, so go and watch the episode first. Ash is killed in a car accident. Martha is told about a service that helps people to deal with grief by giving them a simulated version of the deceased to talk to. The simulation is based on all records the dead person left – social media, emails, blogs and so on.

A lot of that will have been in the publicity copy for the episode. It would be hard to come to it without already knowing that it's about a wife who deals with her husband's death by getting an AI simulation of him. So how does the writer get us to go along with that without just seeming to go through the motions? The base-level technique is always resistance; if the character resists, the viewer is forced to root for the change. So, naturally, when first told about the service she refuses to listen. Her friend signs her up and she gets an email from “Ash”, which she immediately deletes. But Brooker is too good a writer to let resistance carry us through on its own...

Martha discovers she’s pregnant and, unable to reach her sister, she logs on just to tell “him” the news. She finds that consoling enough to agree to talk to him on the phone after uploading private emails and other documents to help round out the simulation.

Leaving the surgery after an ultrasound scan, she drops her phone while playing the baby’s heartbeat to the Ash AI. Of course the AI is in the cloud, but the broken phone scratches open that raw wound of grief. When she gets home and can speak to him again, she agrees to move “to the next level” – an android body into which Ash’s simulated personality is downloaded.

Notice how each step in this progression is tied to the secondary plot development: Martha’s pregnancy. Without that, we’d just go cycling through the stages of the relationship from text to speech to physical body. Even with token resistance from Martha, that would feel like jumping through inevitable hoops. But the even more predictable progression of the pregnancy grounds the current of expectation, so that the consequent development of the relationship with the Ash AI (right up to a kind of home birth in the bath, incidentally, to get the android started) feels uncontrived.

Back to the first scene. A great scene is always loaded with meaning, and this one achieves a number of things with subtlety, economy and clarity. First and most obviously, it shows us that Ash is very active online; he’s barely in the house before he’s tweeting the photo. But that’s just a plot set-up for later. More importantly, the scene introduces the theme of how to deal with grief. “Nobody said anything,” and the photos that were packed away in the attic. From which it’s clear that denial is regarded as unhealthy, and the drama that follows will explore the diametric opposite: keeping the deceased in your life.

There’s also a story seed planted here. Does it matter that young Ash’s smile was faked for his parent’s sake? Martha thinks not, and she’s about to have a relationship with an android who is faking its whole identity for her sake.

Finally, the scene foreshadows the very end of the story, where we come back after the birth of Martha’s daughter to find out what she has done with the Ash android. He’s in the attic, just like those photos.

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

Not wanting to plunge into the intercalary days with a snotty review headlining the blog (see how superstitious I am for a rationalist?) I am reposting my Goodreads 5-star reviews for the year. Have a happy Christmas, Yule, or whatever, and I'll see you on the other side.

Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon

I never quite know if I'm using the term antihero correctly, but I offer Frank Friedmaier for your consideration. Frank is 19 years old, but he's gone far beyond the moral event horizon where a character like Pinkie Brown, damaged angel that he is, still hovers. We're only a few pages in before Frank has committed a spur-of-the-moment murder for motives that not even he knows. He has no pity, especially not for himself, and doesn't even attempt to turn on the charm that makes us root for an utter devil like Humbert Humbert. Most people he knows are afraid of him, and even the few who love him don't really like him much (with one possible exception, but no spoilers here). According to save-the-cat writing doctrine we should have no interest in Frank's future, just as he has no interest in it, but in fact he's fascinating - like a young John Lennon on the loose in his Berlin days, with only slightly fewer scruples.

The writing style is true hardboiled: spare but brilliantly evocative. The atmosphere of the setting (which I took to be Nazi-occupied France, but might be Allied-occupied Germany) is corrosive, bleak, and relentless. Brandon Robshaw's review in The Independent concluded: "Simenon ought to be spoken of in the same breath as Camus, Beckett and Kafka." On the strength of this, I agree.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

How did it take me so long to discover Capote? I'm going to blame the movie. The novella is an unrecognisably different animal - a snapshot of an intriguing character told in prose that ought to be sold at Tiffany's alongside the diamonds.

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

It took me more than 30 years to read this book. After originally abandoning it a few chapters in, I nearly gave up at the same point. There's a whole world and a lot of characters to introduce, and Peake wasn't writing for an audience of TV-weaned YA goldfish. He takes his time but suddenly it pays off. You really know these characters because he has put care into making them individuals. His prose is beautiful and he has the most vivid visual imagination of any author I've come across.

It is, in short, a masterpiece. Normally I reserve 5 stars for books that I feel affect me profoundly and permanently - that "change my life", as all great art should on some level. I regret not coming to Gormenghast a lot sooner. If I'd read it 32 years ago it would have stretched me to create more interesting fantasy worlds in my own books.

Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury

A magic realist whodunit in which the young Bradbury is himself the protagonist. Only, being Bradbury, it's never as simple as that. The murderer seems to be more existential than physical, the familiar landscape of LA suddenly far more fantastical than Mordor. The one flaw is that Bradbury, as a writer who notoriously disdained plotting, allows an important character to slip out of the story while two others, introduced later and in whom we are consequently less invested, become more prominent than they really should. But imagine it as a sixtysomething author getting up and just improvising a prose-poem of dread, beauty, loneliness and the desire to connect with others and you can't help but applaud.

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

They say write what you know, and after six years in the Communist Party and being a prisoner of Franco, Koestler knew all about the horrific absurdities of logic bent to serve fanaticism. This is one of the most powerful novels I've ever read, taking you through the whole spectrum of human emotion, politics and philosophy, but that's not the only reason for the full five stars. It's full of the little inventive touches of a master artist, and the lean writing style (my translation was by Daphne Hardy) gives it all extra impact.

First issue of Mirabilis season two: Spring

Mirabilis on Kindle USA

Mirabilis on Kindle UK

Mirabilis in iBooks

Mirabilis on the NOOK

Welcome to the Year of Wonders

The dawn of a new century. A green comet appears in the sky, heralding a miraculous year when imagination and reality merge. Nothing will ever be the same again - especially not for Jack Ember, reluctant hero, and Estelle Meadowvane, aristocratic astronomy genius, whose adventures for the Royal Mythological Society take them to the furthest corners of a world transformed by wizardry and wild romance.

Dave Morris, Leo Hartas and Martin McKenna, creators of Mirabilis, invite you on an epic journey totalling more than 800 comic book pages, a fantasy saga in four seasons for readers of all ages. The first season, Winter, isnow available on iPadand in trade paperback on Amazon.